We’ve been back in Fiji three weeks now and I would have to say the theme of that time for me is that God is most definitely working all things together for our good. We arrived a day before the evangelistic meetings began in Namaka that Brent was to participate in for his practicum. We took a taxi to the church on Sabbath morning (it’s about half an hour away) and attended the service, which was conducted in Fijian except for the English sermon. Pretty much everyone speaks English though, so you can always ask the people around you what is happening. We were invited to stay for lunch and when the ladies learned I was vegetarian, they didn’t give me anything with tuna or chicken in it, but I did get the tail half of a fish on my plate, which Brent very kindly ate for me.
Afterwards, Brent met the man who would be supervising him and found out about the programme. They started with prayer at five o’clock every morning, visited people during the day, and had an evening meeting every night for two weeks. I may or may not have shed a quiet tear in the church driveway when Brent told me they wanted him to stay on site. But! We then met a lady who offered for Brent to stay in a kind of self-contained flat at her house, just down the road. She took us to see it and we met her husband who said, ‘Sure, come stay! But wouldn’t he prefer to stay with his family? Let’s just get him a rental car.’ And that’s exactly what they did. We were just floored by their generosity.
So Brent was able to drive to the church at 5am each morning (except the days when the Fulton gates were still closed and he was locked in) and they had him do a Bible study after the prayer. A lot of days he and the elders (some of these were quite young guys too) from the four churches combining to run the series would go and see people who’d requested visits, but most days Brent was able to come home for a couple of hours in the afternoon before he had to leave again about 3.30pm for set-up, running health checks, and the evening meeting. He’d mostly get home about 9.30pm when the kids were asleep, so some of those days felt particularly long to me, but I was so so grateful that Brent could still come home rather than me not see him for the whole fortnight. As far as I’m concerned, managing these two small people by myself when Brent shows up for even an hour is far superior to legitimately being on my own.
The kids and I went to the Sabbath programmes and also to a couple of the evening meetings. A number of children from the church took quite a shine to Reggie, particularly, and would run around with him all over the show in those waiting times after the programme finished. Another boy would push Lucy round and round in her pram as long as she tolerated it. At Sabbath lunch on the last day, Lucy seemed to win the hearts (or at least the juice cups) of the sweetest three men from the church who were sitting near us. They had a jug of juice on the grass at their feet and every time she indicated she wanted some, they’d pour a bit out for her until in the end, she had all three of their cups and a lot of juice down her front.
Twenty-nine people decided to be baptised as a result of the meetings, and the baptism happened that last Sabbath. (On the same day back at Fulton, 107 people were baptised, including those from the meetings held at different churches in Lautoka by the students over from Avondale – Brent’s uncle and aunt and cousin were with that group so it was nice to catch up with them.) For Brent the whole thing was such a life-changing experience; he felt so blessed to see God work in people’s lives in such a profound way in response to prayer.
And now school has begun again and so we spend our days adventuring around campus in various ways; someone put up a tyre swing in the mango tree outside our house while we were away, and our neighbours with seven kids moved to a bigger house on the other side of campus (which Reggie can find his way to independently, we’ve discovered, although we’ve now told him he ought not to go by himself – “But Mummy I will be careful! Yes! I will walk on the grass beside the road so cars will not hit me if they come! Yes!”) and there’s always the big volleyball sandpit.
I often look at the clock around eleven and think, ‘there’s still so much of the day left…’ and yet, it hardly seems a few weeks since we arrived at the beginning of the year. No doubt the three months (!) Brent has left of school will fly by too. In the meantime, you can find me here, waiting for the mango tree flowers to turn into mangoes.
Reasons I Choose To Look Up 